


Can't Tell the Salt from the Wound

by lousy_science



Series: The Mutineers [2]
Category: Marvel, Wolverine and the X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - No Powers, M/M, Private Investigators, Surveillance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:11:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15813990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lousy_science/pseuds/lousy_science
Summary: Logan hates these jobs. Scott's around to help, if you could call it that.Sequel toThe Last Time We Fought.





	Can't Tell the Salt from the Wound

Logan woke at three PM. The sun was unforgivable, having taken out every crack in his blinds to relentlessly push into his bedroom, showing up all the dust motes floating over his head like a cloud of guilt. Californian sunlight could suck his dick. He didn’t trust something there was so damn much of. From the first time Logan arrived in the state he’d habitually attributed all of it’s annoyances - from shitty traffic to earthquakes to kale juice - to an excess of sun. No wonder Silicon Valley was full of fruitcakes. They’d all been baked. 

He was hot and uncomfortable. While he knew he’d slept a long time, it hadn’t seemed to refresh his body, only foggy up his mind. Squinting at the brightness of his ceiling, he remembered driving home in the dark from the Siddle job. 

Twenty minutes later and Logan was up was making coffee and chewing on an untoasted English muffin. His current phone was hanging off the charger face down on the counter, and Logan was strongly disinclined to flip it over. He’d filed his report last night from his parked car, thumbing out the short sentences that made up his findings. It wasn’t until it had sent, and Siddle’s person on the other end had messaged back confirmation of receipt, that Logan had unbuckled his seatbelt and walked inside. 

He didn’t want anything else to do with this job. Even the final payment wouldn’t be a relief. It wasn’t that he had to wait, as Siddle was always immediate with payment, and generous with un-asked-for bonuses. But Siddle’s jobs never seemed to really end. They always stretched out through a trickle of inquisitive emails and calls asking Logan to clarify some point, requesting another viewpoint, or wondering if Logan could just come into the office that day and provide a little more feedback. 

_Feedback_. Bullshit word. Logan sometimes got billed as a business consultant, a role people like Siddle and other CEOs were much more comfortable with than investigator, fixer, or problem solver. But Logan didn’t want to spend any more time in conference rooms, sitting through PowerPoint slides, being asked inane questions as if he was some clairvoyant who could read the future for them. 

Sunlight, Logan knew, hurt you if you stared directly at the source. Sometimes his employers had trouble meeting his eyes. They thought they wanted the answers he had, but a lot of the time they tried to cajole him into saying something different, accepting their spin on a situation, not the truth. One guy had paid Logan double to destroy evidence that his wife had cheated on him. 

“Burn them,” that client had said, when Logan tried to hand him the photos and footage of his wife’s infidelity, “burn it all. She didn’t see you, did she?”

Logan had pulled the photos away and tipped his head back. “Bub, they never see me.”

But Raymond Siddle wasn’t like most of Logan’s clients. He didn’t hire him for jobs to validate his own paranoia, or save him from embarrassment, or even, as far as Logan could make out, to make any extra money. Logan had occasionally met men like Siddle before, men who wanted to know the world’s secrets, and they had no comprehension of loyalty to anything but the truth. The truth was their favorite game. 

Logan drank more coffee. Nightwork usually left him starving, his circadian rhythms all off-kilter, but this job had dulled his appetite. He’d head to the bar and check for any messages. That was about enough of a plan for the day. 

Before grabbing his car keys, he picked up his phone and tapped through to the banking app. The payment for the job had already gone through. Siddle’s people were as prompt as ever. 

 

At Guillermo’s Bar there were no messages for him, so he grabbed a beer and sat in the dark for a while. Last night’s job had been the end of a stakeout he’d been doing on the home of Gurjeet Sapal, a contractor who worked for one of Siddle’s companies. Sapal’s comings and goings had to be accounted for, Logan had been briefed, because he was working with very sensitive data. While it was stressed that there was no reason to suspect him of leaking, it was important to Siddle to have him followed. “We want to establish trust,” he’d said to Logan, “in all our most valued employees.”

Funny way to establish trust, putting a tail on a guy. Logan didn’t buy Siddle’s story for a moment, but after a week of being stuck to the target like glue, he couldn’t work out what the real issue was. Watching Sapal has been less interesting than watching paint dry. Staring down at the whorls in the wooden tabletop, Logan reviewed what he’d learned.

This was the third job like this that Logan had done for Siddle. After a string of more typical assignments, working out which rival CEO was about to declare bankruptcy or what particular kind of corruption was going down in a local government office, he’d been put on tracking Siddle’s own employees. Before Sapal there had been Jelena Isakova, an Estonian database programmer who liked tacos and Crossfit, and before Jelena there had been Johnny Hatfield. Hatfield had a name like a cowboy, but he was a milky pale Brit whose only notable feature was his accomplishments in the blockchain, whatever the hell that was. 

Siddle had told him that while smiling up at him. “Are you interested in cryptocurrencies, Logan? We could arrange payment in them if you prefer.”

That had been one of Siddle’s jokes. Logan had replied that he’d stick with Dead Presidents for the time being. 

Each of these tracking jobs had begun in the same way. Like the times before, he’d arrived at Siddle’s home office a few weeks ago. The mansion was huddled behind a lofty concrete fence and a wrought iron gate, only needed a couple of guards armed with semi-automatics to complete the South American Drug Lord look. Beyond the fence, the all-white building’s overblown curves and bulbous windows made the house look cartoonish, like an 1990s idea of the 1960s. When the front door opened Logan always had to peer inside the dark interior, barely able to make out the face of the minion who had greeted him. It was always a different minion, and they never said much as they led him down to Siddle. 

The room at the bottom of the stairs was kept in shadows, filled with pieces of furniture that were little more than twisted metal rods, always looking to Logan like they were trying to spell out words of warning. One wall was all tinted windows, looking over a marble-edged swimming pool that seemed unlikely to be used any time soon. 

From a darkened corner, Logan heard his name muttered. He turned to face the man at the glass and chrome desk as the minion who’d escorted him scurried away as Siddle asked, “Won’t you make yourself comfortable?”

Logan always remained standing. He wasn’t entirely sure how to sit on the frail chairs without breaking them, and he noted that Siddle sat in the one solid-looking object in the room, a tall-backed leather chair. 

“Water?”

Shaking his head, Logan crossed his arms. His eyes had fully adjusted to the gloom by now. He could make out the carafe of ice water on the table, and the slim laptop next to it. He leaned back on his heels and waited. These meetings were always short, but never quick. 

A decade ago Raymond Siddle had been in a bad car accident. Now his left shoulder jutted up far higher than his right, where he slumped over the to the side. Logan knew that behind the arm of the leather chair there was a walking stick, though he’d never seen it used. Even sitting down the expensive lines of his suit lay perfectly. He wore thin-rimmed glasses and a neat moustache. Logan had seen photos of him as a young man, gangly and odd-looking, and age had distinguished him. So had all his money. 

“How are you, Logan?”

Logan shrugged. “Can’t complain.”

Then Siddle asked him if he’d seen some story in the press, something tangentially related to his business, like a land acquisition or the launch of a new company. Logan didn’t have much to say about it, but he tried to keep his impatience from showing. Much. After several long minutes of this, Siddle produced a slim manila folder and slid it over the glass of his desk for Logan to pick up. 

Inside was be an employee file. Logan always understood what he was being asked to do - sniff around, dig up any vulnerabilities, spot any red flags - but he still didn’t understand why. Gurjeet Sapal hadn’t shown any suspicious behaviour, and having Logan watch his house throughout the night didn’t amount to anything but a big bill for Siddle. There had to be some motive behind this, the third job in so many months, but nothing about it was clear to Logan. 

Staring at the table top didn’t help much. Neither did the beer. 

He ran through the three surveillance targets again, looking for similarities between them. They all worked for Siddle, but not at C-suite level, always in Research & Development teams. All had been headhunted from similar roles in other companies, but that was standard practice. They were all foreign nationals, but there was nothing dubious about their visa situations. 

The most puzzling thing about the work was just how boring it was. Even for surveillance, always the most tedious part of a mission, all three jobs had felt endless to Logan. Jelena lived in an apartment five minutes walk from her office, and apart from going to work or to the gym, she didn’t do much else. Even her taste in tacos was conservative, ranging all the way from one food truck that parked on the east side of her street to a Mexican restaurant that was a whole fifteen minutes away. 

Johnny Hatfield had been promising at first, a nervy-looking twenty-five year-old who wore expensive clothes, drove a Tesla convertible and appeared, from the outside, like a guy who spent his weekends facedown in a bowl of cocaine. Logan wouldn’t be so lucky. Hatfield’s weekends were spent either coding or gaming, and outside of designer sneakers his biggest expense was the personal trainer he saw three times a week. 

The target that Logan had been following up until last night, Gurjeet Sapal, was even less exciting. He left his house at the same time every morning, stopping at the same drive-through Starbucks to get his travel mug filled, parked in the same floor of the parking building across from his work, and didn’t leave until eight or nine at night. Apart from introducing Logan to a really good falafel place, Sapal provided no diverting information. He didn’t have many friends, aside from a cricket team he played in on the weekend, and liked to stay in at nights eating vegetarian food and watching Bollywood movies. 

This was the worst kind of work. Slow, dull, and with no payoff. He knew what would happen next. His phone would get a message over the next couple of days, asking him to confirm some pissant detail about Sapal’s life - like whether he had two types of home insurance, or just one, did he recycle regularly or just threw all his trash out at once, if his friend Rajiv Patel was the same Rajiv Patel who had once shared an apartment with one of Facebook’s top developers. 

Logan would check, confirm or deny, and in return there’d be an anemic message of gratitude. Always from a minion, never from Siddle, who only communicated directly to Logan when they met in the room next to the pool. 

There wasn’t anything consistent in these follow-up enquiries, and Logan could barely call them unreasonable. But they got under his skin. It was like Siddle was rubbing it in, that there was some reason behind all this wasted time and effort, but Logan wasn’t going to be allowed in on it. 

This line of thinking took Logan to his worst suspicions. Siddle was using him, that was clear. But the reason wasn’t clear enough to see. He pushed away from the table and got to his feet. The day was over, and it felt wasted. 

 

When he pulled the car back into his driveway, he could see Scott’s pickup parked up ahead. Scott’s half-naked body was visible, too, and if Logan didn’t live in a house at the end of the road that was surrounded by a high fence and some stubborn trees, the neighbors would be getting a show.

Scott, being insufferable, loved the Californian sun. Since he’d been out here his hair had lightened to give him a hazy halo, like the choir boy he never was, and with the fresh tan he looked ten years younger than he had when he’d started his degree. From the back of his pickup a creamsicle-colored surfboard jutted out. Once he’d taken up surfing Scott had started coming around to Logan’s straight from the beach, driving over in nothing but board shorts and flip flops.

Logan made him wash himself down before he went inside. Only thing more annoying than too much sun was any amount of sand. Scott didn’t seem to mind, judging by how he went to town with the garden hose, and Logan parked the car and watched him making small pools of water on Logan’s gravel driveway. The light caught the sheen on water on his skin, the tanlines where his wetsuit cut off on his arms and legs, the long stretch of his neck as he tipped his head back and pointed the spray into his hair. 

For hours after leaving the ocean, Scott’s skin would still taste of salt.

Sitting in the car, the fatigue of the night before hit Logan all over again. He sat still as Scott strolled over, directing the hose spray at the windscreen and hollering, “Logan! You planning on staying in there?”

Logan flipped him the bird from the other side of the glass. Scott opened the door and peered at him. “You’re looking like shit, Howlett.”

“Some of us work for a living.” 

Scott snorted, and Logan stuck the cigar that had been in his shirt pocket back in his mouth, rolling it around unlit. He’d been trying to cut back a little, noticing that between the smog and the sunlight, his lungs weren’t what they were. Still, it was comforting. Like the sight of Scott’s cooler already unloaded on his porch. “You bring beer?”

Leaning on the car roof, Scott looked down at him. He looked like he was going to snap back, but all he said was, “I brought beer. And food.”

Logan nodded. It felt like there was something he was meant to remember, but he couldn’t come up with it while peering into the evening light from his car seat, so he pushed the door open to dislodge Scott and climb out. 

 

Usually once they got in on a night like this, Scott would be prattling about school, or how incredible the waves were, or some other thing, but tonight he just unpacked some hamburgers and buns in the kitchen and went out back to fire up the grill. Logan smoked his cigar and re-checked his bank account. The money from Siddle was still there. It still bothered him, but he didn’t know why, so he turned his phone off and dropped it into his knife drawer. It could stay there with the other weapons. 

Neither of them were great shakes at cooking, so the hamburgers stayed on the grill long enough to banish any likelihood of food poisoning and then some. After they were adequately blackened, Scott put them on the counter and opened the cooler to pull out a couple of tubs of salad that he’d picked up at Whole Foods. One was coleslaw, the other was some kind of grainy deal with spindly herbs strewn threw it. Sitting on the couch, Logan forked at it warily. He liked food that gave you a mouthful, not little bitty things that may be sheltering raisins, but eating it was easier than hearing Scott’s lecture on nutritional fibre again. Besides, it was food and it was free. Worse things in life. 

“You grab some napkins?”

Logan grunted in the negative, gesturing with his elbow to the kitchen. Scott huffed, ever the schoolmarm, and got up to grab them a roll of paper towels. Logan kept his eyes on the TV, but felt the couch cushions resettle around them both when Scott threw himself back down. Logan took it as a cue to stretch out, roll his shoulders, and let gravity do its thing on his muscles. 

He popped a beer from the cooler, now next to the couch, where they could sprawl with plates balanced on their knees and a hefty bottle of ketchup on the floor between them. Scott had turned the huge screen TV on to a ball game. Neither team meant anything to them, so Logan chose the visitors and Scott got the home team, a sad-sack bunch with an ugly yellow logo. 

They sat and watched for long enough to pick up on the coach’s names, in order to abuse them more effectively. Logan’s team were moderately less terrible than Scott’s, but barely enough for him to boast about it. He lapsed into silence as a player was struck out, hardly listening to the commentator’s outraged yelps. 

“You’re not even giving this guy any grief? And he’s my team’s star player?”

Scott had leaned forward from the couch far enough that he got in Logan’s peripheral vision. Logan lifted his chin in the screen’s direction, “He’s an out of shape sack of shit.”

“ _Psssht_ , that’s not even trying.”

Pressing back into the cushions, Logan exhaled hard. The food was good in his stomach, but he couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling he’d had all day. 

Scott kept talking. “You didn’t sleep well after the night shift, huh?”

Grunting in the affirmative, Logan kept his eyes on the screen. Scott didn’t say anything else, just kept eating neat mouthfuls of his salads. He knew that Logan had been working for Siddle, what kind of jobs they were, and it didn’t take all of Scott’s brainpower to see that it was bothering Logan. 

Logan wondered if he was dying to ask more, but the atmosphere in the room stayed calm instead of turning into one of Scott’s interminable debriefings. The game continued on unspectacularly in front of them. It was comforting to see how mediocre it was. So much of Silicon Valley was based around optimising everything, Logan enjoyed watching their inefficiency and laziness. 

After a few more minutes, he replied to Scott’s unasked question. “I don’t know what the endgame is for all this work.”

Scott put down his beer. “What’s your worst case scenario?” 

Logan replied immediately. “Siddle’s planning on disappearing them. For weeks after dropping the trail on the first one, Hatfield, I kept waiting to see him on the news. Body dragged out of a storm drain, Tesla parked nearby.”

Scott filled in the rest. “‘Neighbors reported seeing a suspicious-looking man following Hatfield the month before he disappeared. Any sightings of a cranky old man with a Canadian accent should be reported to police.’ You think they’d plant your DNA on the scene?”

“Wouldn’t put it past them. I’m careful - never accept anything from Siddle that I leave there, never drink his water. But there’s no way to completely protect yourself. And they can easily change the surveillance footage, make it look like I was there when I wasn’t.”

“That’s Siddle’s main business, isn’t it, surveillance?”

“One of them.” Logan took a swig of beer. “So why hire someone else to do a surveillance job?”

“A set-up.”

“But I don’t know what kind. I’m not even sure,” 

He paused, and rolled the bottle between his hands for a moment. Scott waited, and Logan picked up one of the trains of thought he’d had at the bar, “I’m not even sure that he has one yet. I think he likes having me in his pocket. There was something he said, in our last meeting, about me owning the bar. He wanted me to know that he knew. Shit like that.”

It hadn’t just been the bar. It had been something Siddle had said about Logan knowing a college campus well enough to snoop around it. “You’re familiar with it, of course, Logan, so it shouldn’t be hard for you to get the information.”

He’d been talking about Scott’s University. Logan did know it. He had met some of Scott’s teacher trainee friends, all bleeding hearts and borderline alcoholics, at the local bars. He’d picked Scott up after class ended, and even worked out with him at the campus gym. Logan had understood what Siddle was saying to him. He didn’t like it. 

Scott asked him, “What has happened to Hatfield? Anything?”

Logan grunted, shook his head. “Nada. He went back to London to work for a FinTech operation.”

Scott looked at him askance. “FinTech?”

“Financial technology, knucklehead. You know the money in banks doesn’t sit in vaults anymore?”

“No, really? I thought it would be in sacks with dollar signs on the side. ‘FinTech’, huh, you getting all Silicon Valley on me - gonna pay me back for these burgers in bitcoin?”

“Fuck you, Summers. You drink my beer for free every weekend.” 

Scott hadn’t paid for a drink at Guillermo’s since the first time he’d met Logan there. The bar staff had the idea that he was some sort of badass, and refused his attempts at paying them, despite Scott being all Scott about it and insisting on stuffing twenties into the tip jar. Logan didn’t get it, but if you hung around Scott long enough you saw the way people reacted to him. There was an instinctive deference to his authority, even if he was just ordering a sub or dragging Logan into a surf shop to look at the range of longboards.

Logan would end up standing back as shop assistants ran to get him un-asked for free samples and newly arrived stock. Managers would appear out of nowhere to shake his hand and ask how he was doing, as if he had a direct line to head office and would be reporting back. Once Logan had turned on the news and saw Scott being interviewed by a dazzled-looking local reporter asking him for his Man on the Street opinion about a new environmental bill. 

The most annoying part hadn’t been that Scott had an opinion, because of course he did; it was that it was so well-informed, if a little long-winded. Where Scott had got the time to read up on regional wetland preservation laws, Logan had no idea. 

He ended up finding the segment on the news show’s YouTube page and re-watching it, spotting Scott’s face slip from solemnity to humor as the reporter tripped over her words in her follow-up question to him. His hair was curling raggedly with salt water, like it did after he’d been swimming or surfing, and his skin glowed with a tan, without a hint of the kind of five o’clock shadow that Logan always had by around midday. 

Logan looked over at him on the couch as Scott turned his eyes back to the game. If he lifted his hand to run his fingers over that All-American jawline, he’d barely feel any stubble. For all that Scott stayed over at Logan’s, the razor he kept under the sink often didn’t get used. Maybe Scott’s follicles were also in thrall to him, and wouldn’t grow without his say so. When he did grow it out, it always looked neat and distinguished, like he was a GQ model and not a feral wildman. 

It was just one more difference between them, and Logan briefly relished his ongoing resentment of Scott’s goddamn pretty boy face. It was just as annoying as it had been when they’d first met, and Logan had accurately predicted he’d be punching Scott sometime in the future. 

Logan swallowed more beer. “Jelena’s moving in a few weeks. She was the other target. But that was always the plan - her contract with Siddle’s company was only for a year.”

“A year?” Scott leaned his head to the side. “And they went to the effort of having you investigate her.”

It wasn’t a question, just a statement. That was the same thing that had bothered Logan, the lack of evident reason behind these jobs, and it was gratifying that it was beginning to bother Scott, too. 

“Sapal’s on a contract, too. Eighteen months.”

“You know what he’s gonna do next?”

The bottle was empty. Logan stretched for a fresh one from the cooler. “Told his friends he’d like to stay in the States, but told his mother that he was coming back to Bangalore.”

“Who was he lying to?”

“His friends. He accepted an offer from an Indian biometrics company a month ago.”

“I know what biometrics means - it’s like when I use my fingerprint to unlock my phone, right? That’s a big business now.”

“Correct. Have a cookie.” Logan pressed his hand into the side of his chest, where an old wound occasionally throbbed. He felt the ache begin to subside under pressure. “Siddle’s got two different companies working on biometric projects.”

Scott picked up his phone and began to type into it. “Siddle’s companies…”

Looking over, Logan saw Siddle’s familiar Wikipedia page on the screen. Scott scrolled down rapidly as his eyes flickered over the details. Logan could have told him most of it, from the graduation from MIT, the early days in computing firms, the first business success, the first failed marriage, the car crash. Then the recovery that Forbes had called “one of the 21st century’s greatest corporate comebacks.” 

Scott stopped when he found what he was looking for. It was the name of one of Siddle’s enterprises, GyreHub. They were based close by, in a big hygienic-looking white and silver building with the company name stuck on the side like a pill bottle. Logan had stared at it often enough. Gurjeet Sapal and Johnny Hatfield had both worked there. 

Still looking at his phone, Scott said, “GyreHub. I heard something about them recently.”

Logan stretched his feet out, wondered why he’d not invested in a coffee table to lean them on while he was watching TV. Maybe he could buy one with Scott over the weekend. “Yeah, they got another round of VC funding recently. $150 million. That’s real money, not bitcoin, if you’re wondering.”

Scott shook his head. “That wasn’t it.”

He was still tapping on his phone. Logan wanted to stretch out and grab it off of him, and he moved his eyes deliberately back to the TV. It wasn’t that he thought Scott would be any less annoying without his phone. It was just that he didn’t like seeing Siddle’s face in the palm of Scott’s hand, or having his web presence intrude into this room where they were sitting. Talking about it was one thing, having it on your phone - one of the things these people used as another weapon against you - felt risky. 

Logan knew he was being ridiculous, even by his own standards. He waited Scott out. If he was taking this long to come up with something, it was probably worth hearing, though Logan didn’t have to let on that he thought that. 

It didn’t take Scott that long. “Remember Randolph van der Leeden?”

Tipping his head back, Logan tried to remember why the name sounded familiar. “Didn’t he consult for Charles once? Paratrooper, went into the private sector. Worked for some real scumbags.”

“You remember what he was good at?”

Logan wanted to roll his eyes at Scott. Not everything had to be a pop quiz. “Sure I do. He was the fucker who blew up factories.”

“Not personally blew them up, but you’re getting there.”

“I’m getting there? Fuck off, I’ve got nowhere to get. Tell me what the hell you think I should remember about this guy and why.” 

Most people would quit messing around if Logan talked to them like that. Scott wasn’t most people. “There was an explosion in a factory that he was advising the owners on, sure. Think about the context. The workers wanted to form a union. One of them detonated a bomb in protest - allegedly.”

“Allegedly, because he happened to blow himself up at the same time?”

Scott sounded smug. “You’re remembering it now.”

Logan scoffed. “What I said. Guy worked for scumbags.”

“He worked for them as an expert in sabotage. Started off with work like that factory job, but over the years his methods have got more sophisticated. Mainly espionage operations, corporate and government sector.”

“Uh huh.”

“You two probably have a few things in common.”

Tightening the grip on his beer bottle, Logan’s chest felt heavy. Like hell he had anything in common with a bottom feeder like van der Leeden. His first response was to want to smack Scott for suggesting it. Then shake him, ask him why he’d say something like that. Find out why he thought so little of Logan to even make the comparison. 

He stayed quiet. Ignored his gut reaction. If Scott was going somewhere with this, better to let him talk it out. 

Scott held his phone towards Logan. “Like your clients. Van der Leeden’s been working with GyreHub for two years.”

“How do you know - ” Logan grabbed the phone. There was an email on it from a guy called Jackson. He vaguely recalled the name. A humorless Ohioan who’d been in Scott’s unit when he was in the service. 

He read over it quickly, pushing down the feelings of resentment that Scott was even getting messages from this Jackson guy. Seemed that after his service he’d gone to work at the Pentagon, and had run into van der Leeden at some sort of conference for ex-military cronies. He’d written to Scott: _VDL is still prospering at his game. Just took on a big contract with GyreHub to do his thing for them. Think they want to keep it more or less legit for now. From what he said I think they have enough funds to make anything legal._

Logan read it twice, once for the information, second time to look for any hints at this guy’s true meaning. “Why’d he send you this?”

“Jackson and I traded intel all the time. Even after I told him I wasn’t working for Charles anymore, he keeps sending me stuff. I think he thinks that my studying is just a cover for a bigger project. That’s what happens when you work in Intelligence too long, you begin to think everyone has a hidden agenda.”

Logan believed in hidden agendas. He also trusted that Jackson was right. It was harder to imagine that someone would deliberately lie about such a small thing, instead of telling Scott some version of the truth to impress him. People wanted to impress Scott all the time.

“So Jackson likes to trade gossip with you like a couple of old women in a bridge match? And he dropped this in about van der Leeden and GyreHub because…?”

Scott didn’t sigh, or roll his eyes, he just held Logan’s gaze. “Because he knows van der Leeden used to work with us - with Charles. Until he crossed the line on a mission in Botswana. You weren’t there, but I was. The clean-up was bad.”

Leaning back, Logan held his beer against his chest. He’d heard some of the stories about van der Leeden, knew his reputation for results at any cost had been earned with other people’s blood. But he didn’t know that Scott had seen it happen first hand. 

He looked back over and Scott and said, “GyreHub doesn’t have any military contracts. If Siddle wanted his military intelligence, it’s not for product development.”

Scott’s mouth twisted in a half-smile. “Depends on the product.”

“What are you thinking?” 

“All these employees that Siddle has you follow, they get recruited to work in the States, settle here for a few months, and then you’re called in to dog their steps as they do absolutely nothing suspicious. And then what happens? They finish their contract and go work for someone else.”

Logan grunted in assent. It was an accurate description. Scott continued, “Siddle’s workforce has really high retention rates for the industry, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. They pay well, they don’t get the kind of headlines that Uber and Apple do, but the people who matter know who they are. They publish lots of research, and have a bunch of scholarships and charity projects. It’s all a little cult-like. Most of them even dress the same.”

“And none of your marks seemed unhappy with their work?”

“No. They weren’t leaving their offices doing cartwheels but, it’s not like they were spending their evenings doing meth in their basements. Don’t ask me the question, I already asked myself. Why do they leave?”

Scott shuffled around on the couch so that his body was turned towards Logan. He half-shrugged. “What answer did you come up with?”

“That they saw something in the job that they couldn’t stand to be around.”

“But none of them quit.” 

“I didn’t say it was a good answer, Slim.”

“OK, OK” Scott didn’t laugh at him for long. “What about if your three targets weren’t targets. What if they knew that you were watching them, all along. Because since before they even moved to America, they were being trained by van der Leeden to be the perfect office drone. To present to the world the most uninteresting persona possible, so that even someone looking for them to do something suspicious couldn’t find a crack in the facade.”

“They came here to - establish an alibi?”

“Establish a flawless working practice.”

“It was a test. Goddammit,” Logan sat up, wanting to kick something. “He’s training spies.”

“Easier to train a world-class programmer to be a spy than to train a spy to be a world-class programmer. Spying is technical, but not that difficult. The real challenge is whether they can maintain a front.”

“And I’m their SAT exam. I bet van der Leeden is laughing it up over my reports.”

“Do you think van der Leeden knows it’s you producing them?”

Logan growled. “I bet he gave Siddle my name. The pieces fit too well. They pick their prospect from overseas, bring them over and teach them some spycraft, and then send them back to work for a rival and feed all their secrets over to GyreHub. But first of all they have to evade suspicion, not just from the usual pencil-necked fuckers working alongside them, but from the internal security teams.” 

“There’s an art in being so boring you can get away with doing anything.”

“You’d know that.”

“Anyone ever mention that you’re an asshole, Logan?”

Scott was right. Both about his assessment of Logan’s character, and his theory on van der Leeden and Siddle. It made too much sense, that they wouldn’t tell Logan what his brief was, just to watch out for anything; while the targets being tracked were working furiously to seem so normal that they came across more like robots than humans. 

More of Logan’s old wounds began to throb. That happened when he was frustrated with himself. All he could see was his own limitations. 

On the TV, the ballgame continued. The overhead cameras made the players look like toy soldiers, being shuffled across the field by some capricious child looking for a quick path to destruction. 

Neither of them said much. Logan kept drinking, rolling the bottle caps between his fingers to feel the sharp edges. 

On a night like this, either of them could be the one to get off the couch to put away the dishes and walk towards the bedroom for the other to follow. But it was usually Logan who pressed Scott up against the doorway on the way in, trying to get Scott out of his own head by penning him in close. It was easy for Logan, who knew whatever he did, Scott would react, push back into it in some way, either by words or with fists or with open arms and hungry lips. Scott didn’t retreat from him, and Logan could always let go, knowing that he never had to worry about going too far. 

But tonight Logan felt glued to the couch. Scott was moving around in the kitchen, running water and putting things in the recycling containers. The TV got switched off, and he walked over to Logan and took his empty bottle off of him, and Logan heard the clink it made being thrown away. Then he came back and grabbed Logan’s wrist, pulling him to his feet. 

Standing up felt marginally better. Moving through the door to the bedroom, Scott’s hands on his back, made more sense than anything else had that day. 

 

The light was off in the room, and night had fallen sometime earlier. It was good, though, seeing Scott in outline, feeling his breath against his skin as two deft hands pulled his clothes off. Logan wouldn’t let himself be pushed to the bed at first, yanking sharply at Scott’s clothes first. Scott got the gist and undressed before he got Logan sitting down. 

Touch was good. Better than talk, at least while Logan could run his hands up and down Scott’s sides as he stood between Logan’s thighs. Logan leaned in, smelling him deeply. Fingers threaded through Logan’s hair and down the back of his neck. Rubbing at the knots in his traps, Scott said, “God, this must hurt, being so tight here.”

Logan huffed, not committing to an affirmative response, but inhaling Scott’s scent as he closed his eyes. The tension around his head began to ease with bright sparks of pain under Scott’s hands. It was a good pain. 

Ducking his head down, Logan opened his eyes long enough to adjust to the dark. He pitched forward enough to take the head of Scott’s cock into his mouth. 

Above him, Scott gasped. 

Logan didn’t do much with his mouth, just held it slack enough as he cupped Scott’s ass and pushed him forward. He wanted this to weigh him down, the length of Scott down his throat, the pressure on his shoulders from Scott’s hands. 

“Fuck, Logan.”

Still, always, too polite to slam his hips forward and fuck Logan’s face, Scott let himself be pulled deeper in. Logan closed his eyes again, letting himself disappear in between Scott’s hands, smell, weight. 

“Wait,” Scott’s breath was shaky, but he still sounded like a teacher, “wait.”

He pulled out, and Logan deliberately made the noisiest slurp he could at the loss. Even in the dark, he could sense the roll of Scott’s eyes, and it made him smile as his back hit the bed. 

“C’mon, up, up.”

Scott was trying to get him in place. Logan made the minimum effort, content for Scott to scramble over him, rubbing at his chest, moving his legs around, reaching over to the bed stand for the lube. 

Logan had never been one for being petted, but Scott’s touches always had something behind them. He would grab at Logan for purchase, or to knead out a stiff muscle, or to stroke his way up or down Logan’s body. There was purpose, and respect, there, nothing clinical or tentative. He lay back and rocked his spine from side to side. It’d been Scott’s pain in the ass suggestion that he get this fancy space age mattress, and it’d been one of his better calls. 

Scott’s hands pushed up Logan’s legs far enough for him to settle between them. The moonlight caught the planes of his body as he kneeled up, making the blond in his hair glow silver. Logan began to wish they had the light on, and that he was the one hovering above the mattress, within biting range of Scott’s pecs. He wanted to see that pale skin pink up under his touch and taste the lingering salt on his chest, up to his neck and lips. 

But this was good, too, where he was lying back and could watch Scott’s face. It was firm with concentration as he slicked his fingers up and pressed into Logan. Scott always stayed wary of hurting him, and usually Logan liked to buck up and thrash a little more, just to make him fret. 

This time, he just smiled until the white of his teeth flashed in the dark, and kept rocking his hips. “C’mon, c’mon.”

“‘S not a race, Logan.”

Didn’t feel like one, for once, tonight. He felt looser than he had all week, even with his muscles tightening around Scott’s strong fingers, tight enough to make Scott huff and sigh and look a little desperate. 

“Eager is a good look on you.”

Scott looked pissed at that. “Fuck off.”

Laughing, Logan let his legs be lifted up, knowing from experience that Scott loved the heft of them wrapped around his body, whether it be his waist or, like tonight’s game plan, his shoulders. 

His cock was pressing into Logan. Scott was never hesitant about this, nor rushed. He planted a hand on Logan’s chest, right above his heart, and Logan let his arms fall back, opening up as far as he could. If he could let Scott fall into him, he would, just to feel this weight carry all the way through him. 

“Summers,” he breathed out in one long sigh. “Keep going.”

“What do you think,” Scott was breathless as he hitched up, thrusting deep into Logan’s core, “I’m doing?”

There was a spot that Scott reached that made Logan howl, and he kept hitting it. Logan let himself be bent over like a pretzel until Scott’s body was so intertwined with his he could reach up and cup the back of Scott’s skull. Bringing his lips closer he mouthed at his face, both of them moving too roughly for anything too precise. 

Scott’s hand wriggled between them to work over Logan’s cock. He kept it loose and rough, enough to keep Logan on the edge for a while until Logan made a growl of frustration. Then the grip tightened and the movement was harder. They were both getting frantic, and Logan slapped Scott hard on the back. Scott’s spine arched, and he rolled his hips, making Logan feel like a safe that had been cracked. 

The weight of his body left him as he came, a red-hot warmth coursing through his body that felt earned, unlike the heat of the Californian sun. He flopped down on the bed, letting his legs support Scott. 

“God, Logan."

Scott sounded wrecked. Logan cracked open his eyes, and got to see him the moment he came undone. Reaching up an arm to steady him, Logan ended up folding him close to his chest, letting their legs twine together. 

Bending his neck, Logan dropped a couple of kisses to Scott’s temples. That was the place where his migraines got the worst. He carded his hand through Scott’s hair, rubbing idly at his scalp, as if he could defend against any future pain there. 

Lying there, Scott’s body was supple, without the military stiffness he usually had. Maybe it was all that surfing. Logan imagined a shark trying to attack Scott in the ocean and getting a lecture in return. Boring a shark into submission, that would be classic Scott Summers. He chuckled to himself, and let his eyes close again. 

 

Waking up the next morning, Logan’s eyes moved over the same patch of ceiling, before he pushed up on his elbows to check all the exits to the room. Then he looked down at Scott, who was dozing next to him. One of Scott’s hands was tucked under his pillow. Logan knew that was an old habit, from when he used to keep a weapon under there every night. They weren’t used to being safe, alone or together. 

Grabbing Scott’s shoulder he roughly shook him awake. Scott blinked up at him, his eyes taking longer to adjust to the light. “The fuck, Logan?”

“Breakfast.”

Scott yawned. “You know where the kitchen is. I like my eggs over easy.”

Logan threw back the covers, exposing the length of Scott’s body, those legs that went on forever curling up in annoyance. “I’m starting the car in ten minutes.”

As he sat up to pull on the clothes left on the floor next to the bed, Logan could hear Scott scratch at his chest, yawning and stretching. He wouldn’t take long to be ready. Scott wasn’t any good at lying in on weekends, always wary that a drill instructor would start screaming at him. Better to give him a deadline and a place to be. 

The café was just about tolerable, by Californian standards. They did eggs, they did bacon, they did both on a waffle if that was what you wanted. The maple syrup was permissible. Sometimes Scott ordered a wheatgrass shot, just to piss Logan off, but this morning they both drank black coffee. 

Logan looked at his phone screen, and tipped it over to show Scott. There was a message from one of Siddle’s people, asking him to come in for a meeting on Monday. 

“You’re going.”

It wasn’t a question. Logan nodded, anyway, swallowing some eggs. “I need to find out what’s next.”

“And then?” 

Logan craned his neck from side to side. It felt less stiff than usual. “Seems to me, there’s a service needed among Siddle’s rivals. Making sure your security people know how to spot a spy. I think I know who I’ll call first.”

“What will Siddle think of this?”

“That he should’ve hired me, not van der Leeden. That’s what I’m going to tell him, anyway.”

Scott smirked. “When did you come up with this brilliant marketing plan?”

“On the drive over.”

Nodding, Scott wiped his hands on his napkin. “I think I better stay over at yours for the next few weeks.” 

“What, you can’t stand to be away from me, Slim? I’m touched.”

“Van der Leeden knows some bad people. If he makes a visit to you, you know he’ll have back up.” 

Logan had figured that much out already. Van der Leeden was that kind of guy. But Logan was that kind of guy, too. He supposed that’s what Scott was worried about. That was his tactical advantage, the reason he wasn’t all that much concerned about van der Leeden throwing a tantrum on his front doorstep. Because Logan knew he had Scott at his back. 

“You got much study to do this weekend?”

Scott narrowed his eyes at Logan changing the subject. “No. Finished my term papers already.”

Logan stretched his arms out across the back of the booth. “I’ve been thinking of getting a coffee table. I just got paid. Gotta be somewhere in this town where I can buy one.”

Before he replied with whatever bitch-ass comment he was going to make, Scott paused, and Logan leaned back to watch him. The sun was shining on his face, lighting up his eyes, showing the crinkles around them as he opened his mouth like usual, forever unable to shut up and not tell Logan what he was thinking, and Logan was ready to hear it, all over again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Californian-sized thanks to [cygnaut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnaut) for beta work. All remaining mistakes are mine. Title from Warren Zevon's Poisonous Lookalike.


End file.
